CHASKA, Minn. — When you shoot 3-over-par in the final round of a major championship, you don’t deserve to win. Not even if you’re Tiger Woods. That’s why the right man won the 91st PGA Championship. Not with an asterisk, but with an exclamation point.

Few people may have heard of Y.E. Yang before yesterday’s showdown at Hazeltine National Golf Club. But now he will be known forever as the man who ended one of the most impressive streaks in golf history.

Woods had won all 14 of his previous majors after leading or sharing the lead after 54 holes. The two-stroke edge he took into yesterday’s final round made it seem like it was a foregone conclusion he would win his 15th major.

But a major flaw was exposed on Saturday when a four-stroke lead was whittled to two and his play never matched the precision it had earlier in the week when he shot 7-under par over the first two rounds.

He stopped making putts. He stopped getting close to the hole on his approach shots. Ultimately Yang, who played the weekend in 7-under par, emerged as the deserving champion.

“You have to make putts and I didn’t do that,” Woods said. “All the other 14 major championships I’ve won, I’ve putted well for the entire week, and today was a day that didn’t happen.”

He finishes 2009 without a major championship and though he has five Tour wins a year after reconstructive left knee surgery, there is a sense of unfulfilled expectations mostly from fans and the media and not necessarily from Woods himself.

“Nobody in the history of the game has done better than Jack,” Woods said of Nicklaus’ 18 majors. “He finished second 19 times. You have to give yourself enough chances to win them, and I’ve done that.”

The golf world has been waiting for someone to finally take down Woods. That’s the way it is when you’re the Goliath of the game. We thought it might be Padraig Harrington, who won back-to-back majors last year when Woods was out with his knee injury, or Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els or some other proven winner. No one thought it would Yang, a 37-year-old, whose lone Tour win came at the Honda Classic earlier this year.

Guys like him, guys like Rocco Mediate and Bob May might give him a good game, but they were all foils to his legend. Not Yang, whose chip-in for eagle at the par-4 14th and dagger birdie at the 18th will be highlights forever. As the first Asian to win a major championship, he has a well-deserved place in golf history.

“If you look back with Asian golf, I think it’s back in [1998] with the women’s golf where Se Ri Pak won the U.S. Open, that really created a huge boom in Korea golf-wise,” Yang said through an intepreter. “Where everybody started picking up clubs instead of tennis racquets and baseball bats, and with K.J. Choi, winning his first tournament on the oh-so-tough PGA Tour.

“I hope this win would be if not as significant, something parallel to impact both golf in Korea as well as golf in Asia so that all the young golfers, Korean and Asian, would build their dreams and expand their horizons.”

This is the second time Yang has beaten Woods after coming from behind to beat the field at the 2007 HSBC Champions Tournament in China. Maybe it’s no fluke.

“This might be my last win as a golfer, but it sure is a great day,” Yang said. A great day for all of Asia.